1. Technical Field
The present invention is applied to the field of the information and telecommunications technologies, more specifically, to end user-oriented wireless personal communications technologies through a non-cellular wireless communication protocol, such as 802.11 (in any of its standard versions), on PC, PDA or mobile telephony platforms, etc.
2. Description of the Related Art
Services in which geographical information is particularly relevant are widespread today. They are value-added services in the field of personal navigation, in emergency services with positional information, near-by service search services, tourism information, etc.
Services of this type are spreading as a result of the popularity of GPS navigation devices which are progressively being integrated in high-end mobile terminals. However, they are inaccessible for the mobile devices, PDAs or portable computers in which there is no GPS receiver, or in which there is a GPS receiver on board or connected via Bluetooth, but it does not have a clean LOS (Line Of Sight) connection with a set of positioning satellites, such as in indoor settings for example.
Knowing the geographical positioning information of a wireless device is fundamental for:                being included in transactions started from the user of the mobile terminal against Internet servers in which knowing the approximate geographical position is relevant (map servers, etc.)        the user of the mobile terminal to be able to know his approximate geographical position for obtaining services contextualized to his geographical position, such as for example, georeferencing photographs taken with his terminal and subsequently uploading them to a network server for storage.        the mobile terminal to be able to launch emergency services accompanied by an approximate estimation of the location of the terminal.        the user of the terminal to be able to enjoy geographical information-dependent services provided by the mobile telephony operator, such as conditioned diversions, georeferenced warnings, etc.        implementing local data exploitation services in the mobile terminal by means of knowing the approximate position, such as, navigators in the terminal for example.        
Mobile terminal locating methods for cellular-type access networks, which are defined in industry standards, are known. However, there are still few proposals for implementing mobile terminal locating mechanisms in non-cellular wireless communication networks.
Some examples of non-cellular wireless communication systems which locate mobile terminals are discussed below:
Patent application US 2008/0042901 describes a proposal which is fundamentally aimed at defining software processes for obtaining an estimation of the geographical position from power measurements taken of the signal in wireless-type, but not necessarily cellular, devices.
The proposal described in patent application WO 2007/082912 is fundamentally oriented at obtaining a list of available hotspots in geographical positions, but not at locating the wireless terminal itself.
Therefore, one objective of the present invention is to provide new mechanisms for locating mobile terminals in wireless non-cellular networks, overcoming the limitations of known mechanisms.